I have a shameful confession to make regarding smartphones.

A really, really shameful one. You see, the fate of most smartphones is sealed, and I'm not just talking batteries here. They end up down the toilet, or dropped under taxis, or left on train station seats, or simply just dropped on the ground. They shatter, they die, and they're replaced, although that's often when people realise that the phone they've got on a $59 or more "contract" isn't exactly "free" when they want a second one.

Still, that's the fate of most mobile phones. Phones don't kill phones -- people do.

Except that this seems to be something I'm notably deficient in.

Over my entire history of owning mobile phones, I've lost precisely one -- and that was during a hyper-stressful time when my daughter was born and spent six weeks in hospital, so I wasn't exactly thinking straight at the time. That aside, I've dropped one phone (it survived) and tested a few hardcore cases meant to protect phones -- and they worked. I've used mobile muster and similar schemes to get rid of the really old models, repurposed a few into devices for my kids… and even they haven't killed the iPhone 3G I gave them as an effective "iPod", so possibly this is a genetic defect.

Meanwhile, I know scores of people (not just tech journalists) who have lost, smashed, scratched, drowned, shorted out, had stolen and otherwise made their way through scores of phones.

What's wrong with me?

Image: Justinbaeder